Researcher
Benjamin de Carvalho
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Summary
Benjamin de Carvalho is a research professor at NUPI, working in the Research group on Global Order and Diplomacy (GOaD). His research interests have, broadly speaking, been between three areas: (i) historical international relations, (ii) UN peacekeeping, and (iii) status in international relations.
Within these fields, he has published on issues of broader historical change such as the formation of the nation-state in Europe, sovereignty, and the role played by confessionalization and religion. He has also been involved in a number of projects on UN peacekeeping, and has worked on the protection of civilians and sexual and gender-based violence in Liberia, Chad, and the Sudans. He is also involved in projects addressing status as a key driver of foreign policy, focusing on Norway and Brazil. Central issues here are the role played by small states in international politics, emerging powers and great power responsibility. Other research interests include hegemony, popular culture and international relations theory.
De Carvalho is currently involved in work of more historical character. He is currently the Principal Investigator of Empires, Privateering and the Sea (EMPRISE), a project funded by the Research Council of Norway addressing the importance of privateering for the formation of overseas empires in the Atlantic (1556-1856). He is also the main collaborator in Conceptual History of International Relations (CHOIR), led by Halvard Leira.
In addition, de Carvalho has played an important role in the institutionalization of Historical International Relations as a subfield of the discipline of International Relations. Together with Leira, he was instrumental in setting up the Historical International Relations Section of the ISA, of which he has served as section program chair (2015-2017) and section chair (2017-2019). Leira and de Carvalho are also co-editors of the four-volume set Historical International Relations.
He is formerly a co-editor of the leading Scandinavian-language International Relations-journal Internasjonal Politikk.
Benjamin is Editor in Chief of the journal Cooperation and Conflict, 2023-2027.
Expertise
Education
2009 PhD in International Studies, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
2001 MA, New School for Social Research, New York, USA
Work Experience
2006- PhD student/Senior Research Fellow/Research Professor, NUPI
Aktivitet
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Theory seminar: Sonic IR
What role does sound have in the field of IR studies?
A Conceptual History of International Relations (CHOIR)
The purpose of CHOIR is to investigate taken-for-granted concepts of international relations....
Forum: In the beginning there was no word (For It): Terms, concepts, and early sovereignty
It is difficult to overstate the importance of the concept sovereignty for international relations (IR). And yet, understanding the historical emergence of sovereignty in international relations has long been curtailed by the all-encompassing myth of the Peace of Westphalia. While criticism of this myth has opened space for further historical inquiry in recent years, it has also raised important questions of historical interpretation and methodology relevant to IR, as applying our current conceptual framework to distant historical cases is far from unproblematic. Central among these questions is the when, what, and how of sovereignty: from when can we use “sovereignty” to analyze international politics and for which polities? Can sovereignty be used when the actors themselves did not have recourse to the terminology? And what about polities that do not have recourse to the term at all? What are the theoretical implications of applying the concept of sovereignty to early polities? From different theoretical and methodological perspectives, the contributions in this forum shed light on these questions of sovereignty and how to treat the concept analytically when applied to a period or place when/where the term did not exist as such. In doing so, this forum makes the case for a sensitivity to the historical dimension of our arguments about sovereignty—and, by extension, international relations past and present—as this holds the key to the types of claims we can make about the polities of the world and their relations.
Theory Seminar: Political Memory and State Power – Holocaust Remembrance after Communism
Jelena Subotic will talk about her project that investigates the strength and limits of state power in regulating contested political memory.
The Emergence of Sovereignty in the Wake of the Reformations
The elusiveness of the emergence of sovereignty represents a challenge to IR, as it leaves us with many possible beginnings. And as any new beginning marks an end, settling the question of sovereignty begs the question of how the world was without it. Did sovereignty mark the end of an era that would make little sense to IR and its sovereignty prism? In the present contribution I will take issue with such clear delimitations and make the case for a broad understanding of change grounded in the practical challenges of international politics rather than canonical statements about them. My argument is rooted in a dissatisfaction with extant accounts seeking to redraw the temporal limits of international politics in the wake of the fall of the foundational myth of 1648 and the Peace of Westphalia
Introduction: The Emergence of Sovereignty: More Than a Question of Time
It is difficult to overstate the importance of the concept sovereignty for international relations (IR). And yet, understanding the historical emergence of sovereignty in international relations has long been curtailed by the all-encompassing myth of the Peace of Westphalia. While criticism of this myth has opened space for further historical inquiry in recent years, it has also raised important questions of historical interpretation and methodology relevant to IR, as applying our current conceptual framework to distant historical cases is far from unproblematic. Central among these questions is the when, what, and how of sovereignty: from when can we use “sovereignty” to analyze international politics and for which polities? Can sovereignty be used when the actors themselves did not have recourse to the terminology? And what about polities that do not have recourse to the term at all? What are the theoretical implications of applying the concept of sovereignty to early polities? From different theoretical and methodological perspectives, the contributions in this forum shed light on these questions of sovereignty and how to treat the concept analytically when applied to a period or place when/where the term did not exist as such. In doing so, this forum makes the case for a sensitivity to the historical dimension of our arguments about sovereignty—and, by extension, international relations past and present—as this holds the key to the types of claims we can make about the polities of the world and their relations.
Cromwellian Diplomacy
Cromwell's diplomatic efforts aimed at reorienting England towards an alliance with Protestant powers after the English Reformation of the 1530s and the subsequent break from Rome and the ensuing break from its traditional Catholic orientation in European affairs. Through a series of diplomatic negotiations (1534–40) with the German Schmalkaldic League, Cromwell's efforts culminated with the matrimonial alliance through Henry VIII's marriage to Anne of Cleves – which, eventually, also led to Cromwell's fall. Cromwell's main legacy was a dramatic strengthening of England's diplomatic apparatus, and to give the country's foreign policy a new orientation, the Protestant cause.
The family of nations. Kinship as an international ordering principle in the nineteenth century.
This chapter suggests that the phrase ‘the family of nations’ for a long time was more commonly deployed amongst international actors themselves to describe ‘the international’ than more common concepts in contemporary IR scholarship such as ‘international system’, ‘society’, and ‘community’. The authors argue that in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the concept of a family of nations was integral to legitimizing strategies for coercive measures and colonial rule.
The Function of Myths in International Relations: Discipline and Identity
Myths, understood as forms of narrative, providing meaning and significance, are an inescapable part of the life of human collectives. Thus, myths are central to any academic discipline. They tell us who we are and what we should be concerned with, and provide blueprints for arguments about policy choices. However, they also constrain our thinking and limit our choices. Although mythic thinking might be inescapable, it is nevertheless necessary to critically engage the central myths of any discipline, to denaturalise what is taken for granted. In this chapter, we tackle three central sets of myths in IR. The first two form the backbone of the discipline; the ontological myth of 1648 and the epistemological myth of 1919. Together they tell the story of a discipline which is concerned with states in an anarchical system, which grew out of the desire to end war and which is steadily progressing towards a more realistic representation of the object of study. Our final set of myths are the praxeological ones, the myths where academic commonplaces shade into policy-prescriptions. We end by cautioning against reading all historical misrepresentation as myth-making, and against the belief that we can create a myth-free discipline.
Everyday sovereignty: International experts, brokers and local ownership in peacebuilding Liberia
The present article investigates how sovereignty is performed, enacted and constructed in an everyday setting. Based on fieldwork and interviews with international embedded experts about the elusive meaning of ‘local ownership’, we argue that while sovereignty may, indeed, be a model according to which the international community ‘constructs’ rogue or failed polities in ‘faraway’ places, this view overlooks that these places are still spaces in which contestations over spheres of authority take place every day, and thus also spaces in which sovereignty is constructed and reconstructed on a daily basis. Local ownership, then, becomes our starting point for tracing the processes of the everyday enactment of sovereignty. We make the case that sovereignty should not be reified, but instead be studied in its quotidian and dynamic production, involving the multiplicity of actors reflecting the active production of the state beyond its presumptive existence as a homogeneously organized, institutionalized and largely centralized bureaucracy.